Catapulting BlackBerry: A Data-Intensive Look – Part I, Quantity

Unified’s Samuel Baird pens a two-part series that examines the completed sale of the Blackberry portfolio. The first part was published by IPWatchdog.com on May 18, 2022.

At the end of January, BlackBerry announced it had completed the sale of the majority of its patents to Catapult IP Innovations, a special purpose vehicle specifically formed for the acquisition. Approvals for the transaction were granted under the 1985 Investment Canada Act and the 1976 Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act. The value of the deal was reported to be $600 million, a figure that makes it one of the largest patent acquisitions in the last ten years and spurs a great deal of speculation about whether it is worth it. This article explores Blackberry’s divested portfolio and disassembles some of the assumptions surrounding the portfolio and the deal’s value.

Click HERE to read the entire article posted on IPWatchdog.com. In Part II of this two-part series, we will examine some of the data around quality and essentiality of the Blackberry portfolio.

K. Mizra patent likely invalid

On May 18, 2022, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted trial on all challenged claims in an IPR filed by Unified against U.S. Patent 7,394,423, owned and asserted by K. Mizra LLC. The ‘423 patent generally relates to a device for initiating and handling an emergency IP request using an IP enabled device having GPS capability and had been asserted against General Motors.

View district court litigations by K. Mizra. To read the petition and view the case record, see Unified’s Portal. Unified is represented by Lori Gordon at Perkins Coie and by in-house counsel, Roshan Mansinghani and Alyssa Holtslander.

Unified Succeeds in RPI Decisions

For the past decade, across more than 300 proceedings, Unified Patents has won every real party-in-interest (RPI) challenge—whether at institution, on final written decision, or before the Federal Circuit.  

Unified’s status as the sole RPI was challenged in its first filed IPR, where the Board held that Unified was the sole RPI. Unified Patents Inc. v. Clouding IP, LLC, IPR2013-00586, Paper 9 (Mar. 21, 2014) (members were not found to be RPIs, where there was no evidence of funding or control of the particular IPR; challenged claims were later cancelled in a Final Written Decision issued April 26, 2015). Unified overcame every such challenge in the proceeding years. Today, RPI designations are rarely challenged and largely settled law.

Read more about Unified’s RPI decisions on our website HERE.

Unified Patents Launches IETF OPEN

Unified Patents is pleased to announce OPEN’s IETF Standard Submission Portal. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is largely responsible for how the internet operates and is vitally important to how various devices use the internet. Common areas of focus for the IETF include Internet Protocols, APIs, and Routing, (i.e. architecture and backbone of how the internet works). Users can now search all the submissions related to IETF via full-text or by author and source. The submission portal includes over 86,000 documents that are full-text searchable.

The internet standards process includes proposing specifications, developing standards based on agreed-upon specifications, coordinating independent testing and revising proposals based on testing results.

In addition to the ability to search, Portal provides high-level analytics to provide transparency and clarity on submissions to better improve the Internet. Users have the availability to understand the landscape clearly based on the search criteria.

Jeffrey M. Gross entity Compression Vectors reexamination granted

On May 16, 2022, just one month after Unified filed an ex parte reexamination, the USPTO granted Unified’s request, finding substantial new questions of patentability on the challenged claims of U.S. Patent 6,731,813. The patent is owned and asserted by Compression Vectors LLC, an NPE and entity of Jeffrey M. Gross. The '813 patent relates to adjusting frame intervals during compression of a video signal and was previously asserted against Axis Communications AB, Cisco, Hanwha Corp., and Intel. This filing is part of Unified's ongoing efforts in its SEP Video Codec Zone.

View district court litigation by Compression Vectors. Unified is represented by in-house counsel, Jung Hahm and Roshan Mansinghani.

To view any documents for the reexamination proceedings on Unified's Portal, go to https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/exparte/90015000.